The International Institute for Holocaust Research

Towards the end of November 1941, the Nazi authorities began to deport the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia (the Protectorate) to the fortress city of Theresienstadt, about 60 km north of Prague. The city’s 18th century fortress now served as a ghetto. Thousands of deportees were housed in the army barracks under terrible conditions. By depicting Theresienstadt as a "model of Jewish settlement" and thus concealing its role as a transit camp for Jewish deportees, the Nazis were able to camouflage their true objectives and policies namely, the mass annihilation of the Jews.
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In June 1942, the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt – Reich Security Main Office) embarked on mass deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria to Theresienstadt. The Jews sent there were mostly elderly (above the age of 65). They belonged to various groups consisting primarily of those who had earned high military decorations and citations during the First World War, people of international renown, and Jews who had formerly been married to non-Jewish spouses. Included in the last group were what the Nazis coined Mischling, that is, the offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish unions (a term literally meaning "crossbreed"). Essentially these were Germans deemed by the Nazi racist laws to be Jewish because they did not have full Aryan ancestry.

Following mass deportations of Jews from Berlin in 1942, only several thousand Jews remained in Berlin.

This transport departed from Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin on 19 May 1943 and arrived in Theresienstadt in the early evening of the same day. The transport consisted of 100 Jews, of whom 54 were women and 46 were men. The average age of the deportees was 47.4. The youngest of them was 4 years old and the oldest was an 87-year-old man. Six of the deportees were under 12, five of them were between the ages of 13 and 18, thirty of them were between 19 and 45, thirty-one were between 46 and 60, and twenty-seven of the deportees were between the ages of 61 and 85.

A couple of Gestapo men from the Jewish desk would usually show up in order to round up the Jews destined for deportation. The Jews were requested to hand over the apartments in tidy form, after they had paid all taxes. The Gestapo men searched the deportees’ luggage, and the apartment, and often confiscated valuables. Subsequently they sealed the apartments. Jewish wardens who assisted the deportees in packing and carrying their belongings accompanied the Gestapo men. Trucks drove the Jews to the assembly site. This process usually took place one day prior to the actual deportation. At the assembly site the Jews were forced to sign a declaration, authorizing the transfer of their property to the state.

Usually the deportees were woken up at two or three in the morning. They received a small breakfast, and between four and five in the morning they had to leave the assembly camp in Grosse Hamburger Strasse. From there they had to walk a few hundred meters to the tram station at Monbijouplatz, where a BVG streetcar (Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe - Berlin transportation company) awaited to transfer them expeditiously to Anhalter Bahnhof located on Schöneberger Strasse where they arrived at 5:15 AM. There, through a side entrance, they were led to the platform and were ordered to board two old third-class rail cars which were connected to a regular train that left the station every day at around 06:00 for Dresden. In Dresden the cars with the Jews were connected to another regular train headed for Prague.

The train's route took the deportees from Berlin to Dresden and along the river Elbe to Decin (Tetschen), Usti nad Labem (Aussig) and finally to Bohusovice (Bauschowitz). The deportees were taken off the train at Bohusovice station and forced by the awaiting SS personnel and Czech gendarmerie to walk the approximate 3 km to Theresienstadt, carrying their backpacks. Only people who were unable to walk were taken in trucks. The transport was given the reference I/94 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings, where the Roman numeral I refers to Berlin. In Theresienstadt many of the elderly Jewish deportees who had arrived on these transports died of hunger and disease during the following months. Others were later transferred to extermination camps in the East, where they were murdered.

According to historian Rita Meyhöfer, 26 deportees from this transport are known to have survived.

This was the 94th of 123 transports from Berlin to Theresienstadt during the war that were made up mainly of elderly Jewish deportees (Alterstransporte).
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